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It's a simple sign. One message — "No matter where you're from, we're glad you're our neighbor." Three languages: Spanish, English and Arabic. They've popped up in Pennsylvania, Detroit, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Canada – thanks to local printers, and without any national campaign. You can trace the journey back by word of mouth, from neighbor to neighbor or friend to friend. One resident of Washington, D.C., picked up a sign in Harrisonburg, Va. Drew Schneider, the blogger behind petworthnews.org , snapped a picture on a walk, and posted it on Instagram. Now 350 residents are about to pick up...

It has been a week since a massive fire in Oakland, Calif., claimed the lives of 36 people at a party in a warehouse. "Ghost Ship," as the space was known, was an artist community and music venue, and many of the people who attended the concert the night of last week's deadly fire were up-and-coming electronic music artists. Among those who died that night are electronic musicians Johnny Igaz, Cash Askew, Chelsea Faith and Travis Hough. Igaz's project goes by the name of Nackt. Askew was a member of the Bay Area group Them Are Us Too. Faith's project...

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made a surprise visit to Afghanistan today, as part of a round-the-world farewell tour. "The interests we are pursuing here are clear and enduring," said Carter at Bagram Air Force Base, as reported by the Associated Press. "To have a stable security partner that is eager and willing to work with the United States is an asset for the future for us." This is Carter's last planned trip to Afghanistan; President-elect Donald Trump has nominated retired Marine Gen. James Mattis to succeed Carter in heading the Defense Department. NPR's David Welna is traveling with...

Patricia Aquilar, 21, began working at DeRuyter Brothers Dairy in central Washington nearly three years ago. She worked at the dairy's milking parlor, which she says handles about 3000 cows three times each day, seven days a week. Aquilar was one of four dairy workers responsible for pushing and guiding the cows into the parlor, connecting the animals to milking machines, wiping them and the machinery down, and cleaning towels and milk tanks. "I worked six days a week for eight or nine hours," she explains. "They said we would get breaks but we didn't have even a full lunch...

President-elect Trump's nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency was met with indignation from Democrats and environmentalists. Pruitt has been openly skeptical of climate change and has been involved with lawsuits against the EPA. We'll speak with Associate Law Professor Stephanie Tai about the nomination and what it could mean for environmental protection efforts.

The number of new cancer cases grew worldwide to 17.5 million in 2015 from 13.1 million in 2005. And the fastest growth is in some of the world's poorest countries, according to a report on the global burden of cancer in the Dec. 3 journal JAMA Oncology . "Cancer is increasingly important in countries where the main disease burden has always been infectious diseases," says Dr. Christina Fitzmaurice, an author of the report and assistant professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the Division of Hematology at the University of Washington in Seattle. That's an unfortunate consequence...

South Korean lawmakers have voted overwhelmingly to impeach their president, Park Geun-hye, who is mired in a corruption scandal and facing a criminal investigation. But the celebration of the impeachment vote may be temporary, as a panel of justices will ultimately decide her fate. "A lot of attention and focus of the national media and public will be on the constitutional court," says James Kim of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies , a Seoul-based think tank. That court has 180 days to decide whether to uphold or dismiss the impeachment motion. Despite the uncertainty, there was mostly celebration on...

Experts say Wisconsin's shrinking workforce is due in part to the state's poor quality of life. Some rural areas lack broadband access and a public transportation system, which experts say play a part in where people choose to live.

Alsarah was born in Sudan to politically active parents. When she was still a child a coup there forced the family to flee to Yemen. Then, after civil war broke out in Yemen, they had to flee again, this time to Amherst, Massachusetts — all by the time Alsarah was 12. But please, says the singer-songwriter, don't pigeonhole her as some sort of "refugee artist." "I was a refugee coming in. I know what it feels like when you first land somewhere and you don't have any of the resources, you don't know the system," she says. But she notes...